LOL Of The Week: No Country For Moderate Republicans

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The Guardian’s Harry J. Enten took a look at Congress and found that every year since 1977, whether they won or lost elections, Republicans have become more and more “conservative.” Meanwhile, Democrats have remained about as liberal as they were when American men wore shirts that revealed chest hair on purpose.

BREAKING! The study also reveals that Republicans are not only extreme in their own views, they’ve become ruthless in their obstruction.

Since the Democrats took over the Senate in 2007, Republicans have made as many cloture motions to prevent up-or-down votes as the previous six Senates combined.

This purposeful legislative constipation has created the least productive Congress in at least 60 years right as America—immersed in a jobs crisis that has only been made worse by a GOP obsessed with cutting spending to erase a deficit they created.

It seems that the only solution to the deliberate-paralysis Republicans would be more rational — what some used to call “moderate” — Republicans.

History remembers moderate Republicans because the GOP brings them up whenever they’re justifying their latest extremism. Sure, we’re trying to make it impossible for minorities to vote now. But some Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act in 1964! We’re attacking “welfare queens” but hey, remember Lincoln!

Okay. A hundred and fifty years ago, you did some decent outreach. Now the only outreach the GOP does is to push people who don’t hold the party line out of the party.

Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) — one of the three Republicans willing to vote for the stimulus after President George W. Bush left office with the economy losing nearly a million jobs a month — is leaving the Senate. She attacked the culture of obstruction in the Senate in her resignation letter, saying it’s become like a “parliamentary system — where everyone simply votes with their party and those in charge employ every possible tactic to block the other side.”

This coming from the woman who helped hold the Affordable Care Act up in committee for months and then refused to vote for it, even after her suggestions were mostly adopted.